Maria Shishkova
Lyudmila Dolontaeva
Daria Petrova
Deyan Ushlebrka
Rudolf Ovsepyan
The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA)
Natalia Yankovskaya
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For the sake of teaching new specialists in the IT sphere, the Mail.ru Group owns a controlling stake in GeekBrains, an educational portal for training in marketing, design, programming and project management. The company is also developing online learning programs. Specialists of Mail.ru Group conduct more than 15 courses on the most relevant topics on Stepik and Coursera.
After 12-18 months of training, students get skills necessary to enter the profession at the Middle level, and guaranteed employment. At the academy, they train Junior-level specialists and provide internships or real-world experience in a startup.
The main idea of the GeekBrains Project was to create online training for the programmer profession with the quality and depth at the level of university education, but in a much shorter time.
GeekBrains has become part of the Mail.Ru Group holding. At the GeekBrains, they highly appreciate that Mail.Ru Group chose their project after an in-depth analysis of the online learning market. This once again confirmed that the previous 6 years the company had been moving in the right direction.
“We believe that online learning will become one of the most popular services in the next 10 years. It is convenient, efficient and economical. A million users who came to us within one year is a great confirmation of this. We consider the employment of a graduate to be a successful result of our work. We have more than 150 courses in all popular digital specialties, an online university with 8 faculties, partnerships with dozens of IT companies for student employment, and hundreds of thousands of positive student reviews published on the site,” says Ruslan Razumov, team lead of GeekBrains.
Observing the isolation of the modern education system from the real needs of the labor market, they simply could not help but create this portal. So in 2010 the project called "School of Programming" appeared, which later grew into the GeekBrains community, and since August 2016 became part of the company Mail.ru Group. Today, they have more than 3 million users, and with each new member, their collective intelligence makes the project even more useful.
The team of GeekBrains believe that someday getting a full-fledged profession through the Internet will become a new reality for humanity. After all, this opens up endless opportunities for ambitious and energetic people.
The coronavirus pandemic has affected all areas of our lives. Schoolchildren and students are gradually switching to remote training, companies are transferring employees to distant working. A separate category is people who have returned from abroad and are forced to self-isolate during quarantine. Now more than ever, the issue of affordable online learning is becoming more acute. GeekBrain's team can not stand aside in this situation — and make some of their courses free of charge, for others one has to pay.
Practically anyone can enroll in an online university. The applicant must have basic programming skills: for admission, students must successfully pass an online test on the GeekUniversity website. Those who failed the test will be able to get the missing knowledge in the preparatory courses of the university. The program also includes courses on the development of so-called soft skills. For example, students will be taught how to work in a team and effectively prepare for an interview.
On the site of GeekBrains there are 70 disciplines, which are taught by more than 200 teachers, practicing professionals. There are 2,800 students per year. More than 1,400 people have graduated from two-year and semester programs. And on the Technostream video channel, there are more than 1,100 hours of educational video tutorials dedicated to Java, C/C, databases, mobile development, web technologies, Linux, interface design, security and testing, product management, etc.
GeekBrains is an educational portal that helps you start a career in digital from scratch or get new skills for its development. Practical teachers train specialists in 25 specialties and eight areas. The portal hosts 150 courses and more than 900 webinars in various areas. They help students develop professionally and pump soft skills-non-core skills for more effective work. More than 3 million people have already registered on the site and gained access to unique knowledge.
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Razumov Ruslan, Team lead of GeekBrains
Mail.ru Group is actively developing the IT sector in Russia. Owning such popular Russian-speaking social media portals as Odnoklassniki and VKontakte, it is one of the biggest internet and technological companies in Russia. In 2011, the company launched an educational sector as well.
Today, five leading technical universities have additional education programs that allow students to get a specialization in the field of IT thereby giving Quality Education and helping with Decent Work and Economic Growth.